There has been so much said in the last two days about Pope John Paul II that
I decided I would skip the opportunity to put my two cents in. But after
listening to commentaries on the Holy Father’s legacy from all manner of
people, mostly non-Catholics, I can’t resist offering one Catholic’s
thoughts on his importance in my time.

Non-Catholics of course think of John Paul’s support of the Polish
Solidarity opposition to the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe and
believe that will be his most important legacy. He “gave cover” to Lech
Walesa and the trade unionists that stood up to the Polish Communist President
in 1980. That is, when there was no “crackdown” from Warsaw or Moscow, it
was assumed that the communists were fearful of causing a serious rebellion of
Poland’s Catholics that would shift the country into support of the West and
democratic capitalism. I’ve even heard this weekend from talking heads
asserting that if not for the John Paul II, the Cold War would still be with
us, which of course is palpable nonsense.

By 1977, it was clear to me as I wrote in “The Way the World Works,” that
communism was a spent force, and would be put to rest by the revival of
classical economic ideas that would regenerate the West. In 1978, a year
before the Karol Wojtyla was elevated from Cardinal to the Papacy, Deng Xiao
Peng threw in the towel on communism in China, deciding it didn’t work and
that it would be okay for all Chinese to become rich if they could. By the
time Lech Walesa’s Solidarity came along, the handwriting was on the wall
for global communism. All it took then was for Margaret Thatcher in the U.K.
and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. to embrace classical economic ideas -- and
Mikhail Gorbachev followed the Chinese lead in abandoning the USSR’s command
economy in favor of capitalism’s market economy. Pope John Paul II was an
important agent of change in this history, but if he had not been around, the
Russian experiment with communism would have ended just as it did.

If secular history, in my view, will not make such a big deal out of John
Paul’s trip to Poland in 1979, what will constitute his legacy? As a
Catholic, I will submit that for 26 years his greatest contribution will be to
the church, which after all was the job he was given. On one talk show today,
I heard a distaff journalist, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, give the Pope an A+
for what he did for Solidarity, but flunked him because he did nothing “to
modernize the church,” by which she meant he did not accommodate the sexual
revolution that was contemporaneous with his papacy. Another panelist on the
same show, Larry O’Donnell, a Catholic, agreed that the Pope made his
greatest contribution in helping defeat communism, but that he was
“irrelevant” ever since, at least in America, where Catholics ignored the
Pope’s refusal to bend an inch on orthodox Catholic teachings regarding the
sanctity of life.

O’Donnell is of course correct, in that most American Catholics seem to
ignore Vatican pronouncements on these social issues. But I do believe almost
all serious Catholics, and probably most serious Christians of any flavor,
love John Paul II for standing rock solid in his resistance to “modernizing
the church” by devaluing its traditional moral teachings. As a 68-year-old
Catholic who left the church as a young adult and was drawn back into it
because of Vatican II and Pope John XXIII, I’d hope you might understand
that I think of my faith and my religion as a 2000-year-old work in progress.
And it could never have survived as a moral force – with Poland’s
Solidarity or anything else – if the leaders of the church in Rome had
“modernized” every time there was a period of economic distress and a
devaluation of morality.

The Protestant Reformation, after all, was the perfect example of a political
reaction to a Vatican that had lost its way and had devalued the teachings of
Jesus the Christ, corrupted by the coin of the realm and unchallenged
political influence. As a Catholic, I thank God for Martin Luther, a positive
and absolutely necessary agent of change in his time. The Roman monopoly
proved the dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The teachings of Jesus have been well served by the competition of Catholics
and Protestants.

Also today, I caught former New York Governor Mario Cuomo on TV, talking about
the Pope’s legacy. Cuomo is a practicing Catholic, but also a politician,
who in his active years struggled to achieve political power even while he
knew he could not win if he personally lived up to the standard set by Rome.
Cuomo expressed the hope that the new Pope would abandon the standard set by
John Paul II and “modernize the church.”

How sad, I thought, for Mario to be praying for a lower standard than was set
when Jesus told Peter that he wished him to build a church on the rock of his
teachings.

Do you see what I mean? I know it is hard because you are non-Catholic, but
please try. You should at least appreciate the idea that all of mankind needs
a standard to which it can aspire.